Jorge Luis Borges, Author of Pierre Menard's Don Quixote
Promotional note before the essay: My story “Years Scattered Like Fallen Leaves” is now available for purchase! If you haven’t already, please check it out! You can get it as an ebook at My personal web site • Amazon • Amazon UK • Apple Books • Barnes & Noble • Kobo • Smashwords). If you have already read to it, please write and review and/or share it directly with friends! Many, many thanks. Now on with this week’s essay…
…there really is a great deal to be said for the Willie Hughes theory of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. The one thing that you can’t say, however, is that it’s true.
— Samuel R. Delany, on Facebook
There is no exercise of the intellect which is not, in the final analysis, useless.
— Jorge Luis Borges
Long before I had ever heard of Jorge Luis Borges, or even of Miguel Cervantes and his Quixote, my father told me the plot of a wonderful story. It was the tale of a man who sat down, in the twentieth century, and wrote out the text of a novel that had previously been written hundreds of years before, recreating without copying. At first I was astonished by the simple mythic power of the image—the miracle of simultaneous, parallel creation, like the fabled seventy rabbis scribbling in their separate rooms. As that antecedent indicates, the entire notion hints of the magical and the miraculous. And what child does not love fairy tales?
But then my father went further, and told me more: he described how the twentieth century text was (despite word for word, indeed letter for letter, identity) different from the previous one; and that that was the true marvel. That identical texts could differently mean was also redolent of magic.
Some years later, just before I actually read the story for the first time (though after I had read other Borges stories), it briefly occurred to me that rather than reading it, I should write it: that I should reproduce in real life the marvel of the story itself. After all, I knew of "Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote" just about what Menard knew of Cervantes' Don Quixote: its existence, but not its words. (I would even, like Menard, have had to learn Spanish to complete the task—although not having yet read the story, I didn't know that detail then.) So I should sit down, and write, not read, the tale—
The thought was foolish; only Menard could have done so—and he didn't really exist. (Indeed, it was the power of his ficticity that allowed him to do so.) Magic is imagined, not performed.
Yet I begin with this story to show that I have been interested in the tale of Pierre Menard's Don Quixote for a very long time. Had I been Menard—an author, let us recall, far more brilliant than Cervantes—I would have written it instead of reading it.
1.
A disclaimer is in order: I am not a Borges scholar; I read Borges in English1 (as Borges read Cervantes). I write this only because I have found to my surprise that many people have seemingly misinterpreted this marvelous story—and done so rather drastically, reducing a genuinely original insight to mere anticipation of a poststructuralist cliché. I wish to set the record straight—or, more modestly, to propose another reading: one that is not only truer but (and in true Menardian style, I claim this to be more important than its truth) more interesting.
The misapprehension is simply stated. Borges's Menard is taken to be a tale about the influence of our culture on reading. It is (this view goes) about how the reader makes the text as much as the author — or, in some versions, how the social and cultural milieu of the reader makes the text. In this understanding, Menard is a fable which anticipates the arguments of Stanley Fish. The point Borges is making (to cite the introduction to Labyrinths, for many years the standard introduction to Borges for the English-language reader) is that "each twentieth century reader involuntarily rewrites in his own way the masterpieces of past centuries", so that "the Quixote that we read is not that of Cervantes, any more than our Madame Bovary is that of Flaubert."2
While not universal, this interpretation is surprisingly common.3 It is found, for instance, in Borges scholars: the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Jorge Luis Borges,4 in his contribution to that volume, writes:
In "Pierre Menard," Borges presents a conception of writing which is radically new, indeed revolutionary, and which seems to anticipate by some twenty years certain ideas developed by French theorists.… Above all, the story heralds what Roland Barthes would famously call the "Death of the Author"—Menard's project undermines the idea that a text communicates a message from what Barthes called the "Author-God." Barthes replaced the author by an impersonal agent—language or writing—which, he argued, destroys authorial voice, origin, and personality. Every reader, therefore, is a kind of Pierre Menard who repeats the words of the text as he reads and changes their meaning as he adjusts them to his own subjectivity.5
The omitted text compares the story to Foucault, Kristeva and Derrida.
And it is not only, or even principally, Borges scholars who propound this misreading. It is found also in work by scholars in other fields, who bring Menard in as a companion piece, a friendly theorist, or a conceptual test-case. These scholarly incidentals are probably more influential in propounding this misreading than the work of specifically Borgessian scholars, since they are more widely read. (In general, the casual errors of passing references are probably an understudied source of scholarly misunderstandings: it is the later links in the whispers game that really tend to distort the original message.) Here, for instance, is the editor's note to Borges's story from the Norton Critical Edition of Don Quijote6:
Menard's act of "authorship" attempts to abolish the distance between writing and reading, to link them together in a single signifying process.… All literary works, Borges' story suggests, are "authored" anew by different cultures and different readers. Borges is here fictionalizing a process that would become a major tenant of poststructuralist discourse, namely, the supremacy of reading over writing.
This misunderstanding also appears in several related forms. Instead of understanding Borges as anticipating poststructuralism, some scholars take Borges's Menard to be a fable about the nature of translation. For example, in After Babel, George Steiner calls Borges's tale "the most acute, most concentration commentary anyone has offered on the business of translation."7
This list of examples could be extended at some length; but the misinterpretation by now seems sufficiently established.
But is it a misinterpretation? Are all these venerable scholars and thinkers really misreading? What evidence might be adduced for that?
A single, brief phrase provides sufficient compulsion to find another interpretation: "on the other hand".8 The phrase occurs during the rhetorical high point of Borges' story, its crowning glory, the moment when Borges compares a paragraph from Cervantes's Quixote with one from Menard's—and the highlight of the highlight is Borges' marvelously casual "on the other hand." Though the words quoted are the same, Borges discusses the differences in style, in allusion, in meaning, ultimately preferring Menard's Quixote to Cervantes's. Nearly everyone who discusses, or even mentions Menard — even as a fairy tale to a young child — mentions this part of Borges's story.
But note that Borges' comparison of Menard and Cervantes would be impossible if it were the case that our historical age necessarily dominates our readings, or if each reader revises the text for themselves. In that case we could not read Cervantes at all: we could only read Menard, a twentieth-century filter on a seventeenth-century text. In fact, we would read something far poorer than Menard: not the rich creation of the twentieth century, but our dulled view of an earlier time. Borges wants us to see the difference between the texts; hence both are still legible to us.
Borges is writing about neither translation (the quoted texts are identical —that being, after all, the heart of Borges's joke), nor about reading, since we are perfectly able to read Cervantes's Quixote just as well as Menard's (or else we could not compare them). Borges is discussing authors: the importance of their lives and times in interpreting their writing.
Borges' Menard is a genuinely scientific experiment, perhaps the first such ever conducted in the field of literature. It is a thought experiment, naturally: the sort of experiment which Einstein used to study light and gravity in imaginary elevators. Borges wished to study the effect of our knowledge of the writer of a text—their life, their chronological period, their times—on our reading of that text. All those who studied this before, however, were hampered by a powerful uncontrolled variable: all the writers had different texts. Cervantes wrote Don Quixote, while others wrote other tales of giants or windmills.
So Borges cut this Gordian knot with his mythical sword. Borges—like an acrobat, making it look easy—controlled this variable. He created the same text, word for word, with two different writers; and held them up for comparison.
And Borges came to the conclusion that—of course; inevitably—a writer's identity make a difference. The Author is not dead;—or, if dead, has left a legally unbreakable will. Cervantes lived a specific, particular life: starting in the sixteenth century, ending in the seventeenth. The truths about his historical age—like, for instance, that, written at that time "history is the mother of truth" was, in Borges' words, "mere rhetorical praise of history"—are important. And the more we learn about an author's historical time, the better we will read her or him. This is why history is essential to reading; biography is essential to reading; a deep knowledge of the period in which an author wrote, what the words meant then, is inescapably necessary. History is the mother of truth: and in history's light we must read our texts.
2.
Except --
Except that Borges doesn't quite end there. As with the very best scientific experiments, Borges' experiment has not only shed light on the issue he thought he was investigating, but has opened up an entire new avenue of exploration and truth. Borges, having demonstrated that writers do make a difference, Borges is lead to another, even more profound, discovery: that of a new way of reading. It comes in Borges' final paragraph
Menard (perhaps without wanting to) has enriched, by means of a new technique, the halting and rudimentary art of reading: this new technique is that of the deliberate anachronism and the erroneous attribution. This technique, whose applications are infinite, prompts us to go through the Odyssey as if it were posterior to the Aeneid and the book Le jardin du Centaure of madame Henri Bachelier as if it were by madame Henri Bachelier. This technique fills the most placid works with adventure. To attribute the Imitatio Christi to Louis Ferdinand Céline or to James Joyce, is this not a sufficient renovation of its tenuous spiritual indications?
It is not the petty inaccessibility of the real (that overfished postmodernist sea) that Borges charts, but the superiority of the imagined to the real. It's not that we can't read Cervantes' text; of course we can. But we don't need to. The text is much richer if we instead read Menard's—just as Joyce's Imatio Cristi is infinitely richer that Loyola's. And equally available to be read.
The possibility of historicism is, after all, Menard's first thought in writing his Quixote: to become Cervantes, learn the lineaments of his language and the context of his world. And he rejects this, not because historical recreation is impossible, but because it is less interesting than the alternative: to arrive at the Quixote by another route, through today's world. Of course Menard is fictional, his project miraculous: but there is no reason not to add the thin layer of another fiction on top of one an author created. Giants, after all, are more entertaining than windmills, their nonexistence notwithstanding.
(And perhaps it is no accident that Borges chose the Quixote to tell his tale about; not only because it is the canonical center of Spanish literature, as Shakespeare is in English, but because it is about the glory and ludicrousness of the fantastic and the palpability and shabbiness of the real. Quixote is mad, but beautifully so; Cervantes—like (in this case) Menard—mocks the imagination but also glories in it. Cervantes did not write slipstream: it is not a possible reading of the Quixote that Quixote is not mad, that the windmills he sees really are giants, who somehow deceive others as to their true nature, and so forth. Truth is knowable. But at the same time, the imagination is something wonderful, something to glory in, to laugh over, to write an entire work about.)
Suddenly a whole new question is opened up. The issue of whether The Author is alive or dead becomes moot; the new question is whether The Author is charming or dull. And like the clouds that to imaginative eyes become castles and the vast whales that threaten to swallow them, how much richer are our imaginings!9
Thus Beloved and Rabbit, Run are both wonderful modern novels; but wouldn't it have been more interesting had Toni Morrison written the latter, and John Updike the former?
Menard's "new technique [in] the halting and rudimentary art of reading" can reinvigorate texts that might otherwise seem daunting or diminished or dull. Ulysses by Joyce may seem a stodgy old book, the latest of the Great Books that needs respecting, and is forced down unwilling throats like so much Dimetapp: terribly dull. But Ulysses by the new and unknown author James Hapce is a fresh text, filled with humor and wit and insight and verve. Or pick up Ulysses by Cervantes and you'll find an incredible piece of Science Fiction, while Ulysses by Nicholas Baker an incredible piece of historical fiction—to say nothing of in a clear line of development (upwards, to be sure) from the hyper-realistic list-making of The Mezzanine.
Reading with Menard, all philosophical texts are in dialogue with each other: Plato responds to Frege, Kant rebuts Nietzsche, Wittgenstein creates a more subtle and complex version of the ideas of his powerful predecessor, Kripke.10
We know the Torah was written by divers hands, whom we for convenience call J, E, P, and D; and if we are historians, interested in truth, it would be folly to deny this. But once we have said this—and can thus set it aside—the question is, is that the most interesting Torah to read? Perhaps for archeologists. But the Torah of Moses is far richer, deeper and more interesting than the patchwork of the redactor. Every word becomes loaded; every contradiction, infinitely delvable. The deep well of the midrash takes on a rich relevance: not as historical truth, but as literary truth. In the Torah of the redactor, the name of God changes between Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 because the author changes: very well, good to know. But in the Torah of Moses, the name of God changes there because the world had been created and destroyed a thousand times before it was completed. Which text would you rather read? Moses is a far better author than J; his fiction far richer than hers. We can chose, not to believe (evidence must bear upon belief, and is against this one), but to pretend that the Torah of Moses was written by Moses.11
Menard also sheds new light on the pseudo-controversy about Shakespeare's authorship: not only are the Shakespearean Oxfordians wrong on the merits; far more damning is that their Shakespeare is much less interesting—an irritated nobleman translating petty squabbles into bickering plays, rather than a playwright staging humanity on the boards. Even if the Oxfordians were correct, Shakespeare's Shakespeare would be far more worth reading.12
To be sure, we must select our fictions with care; not all fictitious readings are more interesting than the real. If we simply pick at random, we may pick up Hamlet and find it, like the pedantic reader in the old joke, nothing but a long string of quotes run together.
Had Menard simply slain the author, he would be left—as the poststructuralists have been left—with nothing but a decomposing corpse and a putrid smell. By promoting the author—retiring him up, as is said in the corporate world—he has freed the rest of us from the undeniable but wearisome burden of the facts, and enabled us to read living texts—however we need to make them living.
For those who have trouble imagining how this is done, I have involuntarily experienced an author-slip in two ways. The first is simple, and has applied for me mostly to journalism: to open an editorial or essay and to misread, misremember or misnote the author. Reading liberal arguments in a conservative voice, or vice-versa, is deeply refreshing, and lends to them a vividness and importance which then drops away like soiled linen once I look back up and correctly note the author. More powerfully, more rarely, closer to the true Menardian, is the experience where, after reading a sustained amount by one author, I suddenly turn to another, and for a paragraph or two hear the latter in the voice of the former. It is a deeply refreshing, deeply jarring experience, to read Dickens in the voice of Updike, words sitting oddly against their habitat, brought to vivid life by juxtaposition. It is an accidental stumble through a magical door, which is open and available to us all, any time we wish to pass through it.
3.
But if truth is our concern, we must honestly ask whether this reading of Borges is, indeed, what he intended. Is my reading correct?
The evidence on this point must be admitted to be mixed. Commentators who read Menard as do I tend to lean (as have I) on the closing comparison, and the logical implications of its existence. But there is more to the story. Steiner adduces a fair amount of evidence from the list of Menard's works that translation was on his mind; he also carefully reads the specific chapters of the Quixote which Menard completed (only a handful), providing further evidence for his own reading.
Other passages might be adduced as strains of genuine postmodernism in Borges's Menard. Borges says (in interpreting the sole quoted passage from Menard's Quixote) that "Historical truth, for [Menard], is not what has happened; it is what we judge to have happened." This may be taken as a dash of poststructuralist relativism too. Although here, at least, counter-counter interpretations are possible: Borges's narrator explicitly cites William James, and says the end of the quote is "brazenly pragmatic"; this implies a different, less relativist reading of the above-quoted sentence than the postmodernist one.13
And there is more. There is the radical ambiguity implied by ascribing to Menard the "resigned or ironical habit of propagating ideas which were the strict reverse of those he preferred", which calls into question any reading of Menard's text, since any claim might well be the reverse of the author's intent. And then there are other texts of Borges's may be brought to bear on the interpretation of this one. Perhaps those, too, might support the poststructuralist reading…
So perhaps this isn't what Borges meant.
But.
But let us imagine, then, a different story: a fragmentary story entitled "Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote" by, not Jorge Luis Borges, but by Pierre M. Segrob, an unknown twenty-first century writer without other published work— a story which (it so happens) is lexically identical with the second half of the English translation of a story by Borges. As the sole text of its author, no other text of Segrob's can be brought to its interpretation. He, we can speculate, is familiar with Putnam and Haack's interpretation of the Pragmatists, and includes the mention of James, and the description of Menard as "brazenly pragmatic" with precisely those readings in mind. And since only the second half of Segrob's story exists, the list of Menard's influences is not an issue within it.
Borges's story may not mean what I claim, but Segrob's most definitely does.
And, crucially, Segrob's Menard is "almost infinitely richer" than Borges's.
Let's be clear. The truth is learnable—sometimes, partially, as much as evidence, insight, effort and the inevitable mistakes of any human work will allow. (Perhaps rather than "learnable" we should say that it is "explorable": we can investigate, can inquire, a project which is always (in principle) endlessly extendable.) We know that Cervantes wrote Don Quixote, that four or more individuals wrote what we know of as the Torah, that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare and that Homer was written by another Greek of the same name. If we want to understand the texts as they were meant—important for historical circumstances, to clear up misunderstandings, and (perhaps above all) to pave the way for more lively readings—we need to put them in history. The mother of truth does not get the last word; but it does get the first.
But we need not stop there. If we wish to read not dead authors but live texts, we should not.
Borges wrote not only a fiction, but fiction: the delightful superiority of the imagined to the real, the power of the unreal to tell truer truths than the mundane, inarguable facts. The Author is alive and well, but can stay in the schoolroom, while we romp on the playground. Authors made their fictional works, and added a title; Borges made fictional their signatures, and liberated their works from those petty shackles, trivializing the circumstances of their accidentally actual creation.
Translations of "Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote" consulted include that of Anthony Bonner (from Ficciones), that of James E. Irby (from Labyrinths) and that of Andrew Hurley (from Collected Fictions). Any mistakes made are clearly my responsibility, although they can hardly be said to be my doing.
André Maurois, "Preface", in Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings (New Directions, 1964), p. xii.
As this implies, there are some scholars who, in contrast to the ones I shall be discussing, read Menard along similar lines that I do. (One example is Charles Hatfield's "From Posthegemony to Pierre Menard" (Nonsite.org); another is Rex Butler's Borges Short Stories: A Reader's Guide (Continuum, 2010)) I should note, however, that like Menard's Quixote, this is a case of independent creation, and not mere copying; I read them only while researching this piece. (Unlike the genius Menard, however, I did not create texts that were verbally identical to theirs.) This essay was sparked not by the conviction that my interpretation was original or noteworthy, but by my astonishment that it was not universal. Nevertheless it may comfort readers who are impressed with expertise to know that my reading is shared by at least some distinguished scholars.
Ed. Edwin Williamson (Cambridge University Press, 2013).
Edwin Williamson, "Borges in Context: the Autobiographical Dimension", in ibid., p. 211.
ed. Diana de Armas Wilson, New York: W. W. Norton, 1999.
George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (Oxford, 1975), p. 70.
"En cambio"; the rendering of the phrase is identical in the Irby, the Bonner, and the Hurley translations.
And also as for clouds, our imaginings can shift quickly, with the wind: they are not the less for that; indeed, it is that which makes them so much more.
Borges's invention of the imaginary author has its precursors, as nearly all inventions do. One of its precursors is the imagined simultaneity of all texts, an invention which is easily produced by the illusions of reading order, the duplications of font, and the lack of concern of the reader about the author photo at the back. Thus Emerson wrote of this simultaneity:
I am very much struck in literature by the appearance that one person wrote all the books; as if the editor of a journal planted his body of reporters in different parts of the field of action, and relieved some by others from time to time; but there is such equality and identity both of judgment and point of view in the narrative that it is plainly the work of one all-seeing, all-hearing gentleman. I looked into Pope's Odyssey yesterday: it is as correct and elegant after our canon of to-day as if it were newly written. The modernness of all good books seems to give me an existence as wide as man. What is well done I feel as if I did; what is ill done I reck not of. Shakspeare's passages of passion (for example, in Lear and Hamlet) are in the very dialect of the present year."
Though if by "J" we mean not the flat scholarly anonymity of the bare letter but the charming ironist invoked by Harold Bloom, then she does indeed have some authorial power of her own — although that J is an invention, one which (as Bloom all but admits) is almost as much of a fiction as Moses the stenographer is.
This has been said before, but I forget in what words, and by whom; I thus have taken the liberty of recreating the sentiment without reference to the earlier text.
On the non-relativism of James, see Hilary Putnam, "James's Theory of Truth". A similar point about the invocation of James undercutting rather than supporting a relativist reading of Borges is made by Hatfield (op. cit.)